Chapter 16
HERNANDEZ CHECKED HIS disguise in a mirror in the cosmetics section. Not even his own not-so-dear and dead mother would recognize him like this. Gringo to the max, man. I could be one chubby boy under all these clothes, right?
“How many?” Cobb’s voice muttered through the earpiece hidden beneath the locks of the blond wig, breaking Hernandez from his thoughts.
“Nine total,” Hernandez replied.
Silence, then a comment from Watson: “Video and audio feeds are crisp and strong.”
Cobb said, “Take five, Mr. Hernandez, drop the card, and leave.”
“Going mundane,” Hernandez said, feeling a familiar thrilling sense of descent, of regressing to the primitive, of tasting bloodlust.
He angled through the store, sniffed the perfumed air, plucked a king-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and tore it open. He dropped the candy into his mouth, savoring the melt as he walked to the prescription window, noticing that the pharmacist was on break. An old black woman stood to one side, hands on her wooden cane, waiting for her medicine, looking at him suspiciously.
A pimply redheaded woman, the only one behind the counter, said brightly, “Here to pick up, sir?”
“More like a drop-off,” Hernandez said, drawing the suppressed weapons.
He shot her at point-blank range with the right-hand gun and then whirled, looking for the old woman. The crazy bitch was already swinging at him with her cane. It broke across his arm, right across the new tattoo, setting it afire, shocking him, but only for a moment before he realized she was moving to stab him with the splintered end of her cane.
Hernandez’s left hand swung instinctively, aimed at the old woman’s chin, and shot her there. She crumpled to the tile floor.
“Weak, Mr. Hernandez,” Cobb said. “You should have taken her first.”
Hernandez ignored the criticism, stalked through the aisles, his arm screaming in pain, but believing that no one else in the store, what with the Muzak braying, had heard the suppressed shots or the bodies falling.
Guns back in his hoodie’s pocket, he walked past a teenage girl shopping for nail polish in aisle three. He skirted a plump guy looking at razors in aisle five but killed an older man checking out incontinence pads in aisle seven.
He considered the middle-aged woman perusing the paperback racks, a mystery novel in one hand, but then shifted his focus to the two clerks manning the front desk, man, woman, both in their late twenties.
The male clerk died stocking cigarettes, shot in the back. “You got company coming,” Cobb said. “Move.”
The female clerk died screaming, the first to be aware of her impending death, trying to crouch and hide beneath the cash register.
Hernandez turned, surging on adrenaline. He began to hum a favorite tune. It never got old, this feeling, better than any video game ever. Nothing came close to the real thing. Difference between porn and …
Ten feet away, an anxious Latina woman in a blue business skirt and pink blouse and her thumb-sucking toddler in the seat of her shopping cart were staring at him, frozen with terror.
“No,” Sheila Vicente sobbed. “Please, I’m just here for the Xanax.”
Every nerve fiber, every cell in Hernandez told him to wax her, right now. The kid too. It would make a statement. No quarter would be given.
He took two steps toward the young mother as she wrenched her child to her breast and sank to her knees, begging incoherently. He stood over her, the guns aimed at her crying eyes and the back of her little boy’s head, savoring the power, smelling the torrents of fear pouring off her. His fingers sought the triggers.
“Stop,” Cobb said, and then told Hernandez exactly what to do. Hernandez didn’t like it, but for once he followed orders to a T.
“Cell phone,” Hernandez barked at her. “Give it to me.”
Shaking, crying, Sheila Vicente got her cell and threw it down. Hernandez crushed it with his heel, slid the guns into his hoodie. He crouched before her, handed her a Baggie with a lime-green card in it, said, “I want you to personally give the mayor this. Don’t show the cops. Just tell them that you have a personal message for the mayor from me. Tell that bitch that unless she complies with my demands there will be no mercy after this. None.”
Then Hernandez stood, turned, chuckled, and walked out the door of the pharmacy, humming that favorite melody of his, as if he had not a care in this world.